Idris Ackamoor, always known as a sharp dresser, sports a pair of crocodile and zebra shoes from South Africa Monday March 31, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. Producer and musician Idris Ackamoor celebrates 35 years with his theatre/arts/performance group Cultural Odyssey he founded 35 years ago.

Idris Ackamoor rehearses on stage with his alto saxophone Monday March 31, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. Producer and musician Idris Ackamoor celebrates 35 years with his theatre/arts/performance group Cultural Odyssey he founded 35 years ago.

Idris Ackamoor smiles as he rehearses with his alto saxophone Monday March 31, 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. Producer and musician Idris Ackamoor celebrates 35 years with his theatre/arts/performance group Cultural Odyssey he founded 35 years ago.

When Cultural Odyssey puts up a program of "new works," you never know what might be in store. Take its current "35th Anniversary Showcase."

Yes, founder Idris Ackamoor is on the bill, playing alto saxophone with his avant-jazz group the Pyramids - as well as directing his new, quite different Music Is the Healing Force Community Orchestra. And yes, longtime partner Rhodessa Jones will present an excerpt from her Medea Project work-in-progress. But there's also a documentary film preview - "Talk Back Out Loud," about the Medea Project's longtime work with incarcerated women - as well as harpist-vocalist Lyrika Holmes. And Planned Parenthood.

That mix isn't a bad introduction to the wide-ranging work of Cultural Odyssey. Just Ackamoor has developed from an ambitious teenage jazz musician into a composer, tap dancer, actor, theater director and all-around producer, the company he founded 35 years ago continues to evolve.

"I've been playing music since I was 8 years old," the 63-year-old Ackamoor says, rattling off a succession of instruments in childhood: "clarinet, saxophone, piano, violin. I was never satisfied with any one thing."

Born and raised as Bruce Baker on Chicago's South Side, Ackamoor says his mother's work in the Civil Rights Movement formed "some of my earliest memories."

Activist mother

"This was like in the late '50s. Most of the black schools on the South Side had to go on double-shift because of overcrowding. My mother taught in one of those schools, so she organized a one-day stay-at-home, when the parents kept their kids out of school for a day. She was fired for that, and her firing led to what I think is one of the longest strikes in Chicago school history. That led to the end of the double-shifts, but the superintendent wouldn't re-hire my mother."

The firing didn't deter his mother's activism, but it had a major impact on his future. Though she was soon hired as one of the first black teachers in a nearby Wisconsin school district, "she never sent her kids back to public schools."

Ackamoor went to the prestigious University of Chicago "lab school," "the same school," he notes, "that the Obama kids went to before they moved to D.C."

He played in the school band, until he got into basketball - when he had to choose between the two and "I just put the saxophone under my bed" for about four years. He got a basketball scholarship to Iowa's Coe College, but decided his future lay more in music, and he ended up attending Antioch College in Ohio.

By the time he graduated from Antioch, Ackamoor had formed his first band, the Collective, begun making his own instruments ("I still have some of those flutes") and played for a year with Cecil Taylor during the legendary pianist's residency at the school. He'd also changed his name adopting the surname of an ancestor. And he'd almost lost his left hand.

"I was just moving too fast," he says. "I was using this scary looking saw to groove out a piece of wood. So I was alone in this woodshop, making this instrument, and blam. My life flashed in front of my eyes, and I was thrown to the floor."

The accident severed his left index finger and left the middle finger paralyzed. Knowing Ackamoor was a sax player, the doctor who treated him left that finger "paralyzed in a curve, almost like I was playing the saxophone."

Ackamoor was also a budding entrepreneur. The senior year abroad course of study he devised sent him and two other students to Europe to start their own band - the Pyramids - then travel through Africa, learning from indigenous musicians in Morocco, Senegal, Ghana and Kenya.

Back in the U.S., Ackamoor and his then-wife and bandmate Margo Simmons moved to San Francisco. The Pyramids self-produced three albums - "Lalibela," "King of Kings" and "Birth Speed Merging," and enjoyed some success, but the group, and his marriage, had broken up by 1977.

It was a chance bit of reading material that led to Cultural Odyssey - "an NEA circular that said something like, maybe musicians should start forming nonprofit organizations like dance and theater companies. It hit me like a thunderbolt."

Soon, Ackamoor was performing as Cultural Odyssey. In 1983, he joined forces with Jones and they had their first big hit with "The Legend of Lily Overstreet," a piece she had performed in a larger format, reduced to a duet. One success followed another - "I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine," "Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women" and works developed with such notable artists as Jones' brother, Tony-award winning choreographer Bill T. Jones.

Medea Project

Rhodessa Jones' work as a teaching artist in the San Francisco County Jail evolved into the Medea Project, with Jones creating works with the inmates based on their own stories. That work has expanded into similar projects as far afield as jails in the Caribbean and South Africa. With "Birthright," the excerpt in the current showcase, Jones is working with Planned Parenthood Shasta Pacific on women's reproductive issues.

"When I started Cultural Odyssey," Ackamoor says, "my goals were quite simple, to support myself as a musician and see if I could be a 360-degree artistic being. I've achieved that, for me and Rhodessa - full-time salaries, retirement accounts, health insurance. I'm writing a book now called 'Don't Drop Dead Onstage,' the performing artist's guide to retirement."